[You want to read the earlier installments, and we want to help you: Part 1, Part 2] [Drumming our fingers on the tabletop, humming along to Debbie Gibson, we contemplated just walking out on our waitress, when Jeremy remembered a Payday he had in his pocket. Passing it back and forth, we resumed our conversation.] [...]
Posts Tagged ‘John Gardner’
What do you want to be? Who are you? Now what do you want to be?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Albert Camus, John Gardner, Samuel Beckett, Susan Sontag on March 5, 2010 | 84 Comments »
Anne K. Yoder recently pointed out this Susan Sontag quote to me (it’s from the opening of her review of Camus’ notebooks, written in 1963): Great writers are either husbands or lovers. Some writers supply the solid virtues of a husband: reliability, intelligibility, generosity, decency. There are other writers in whom one prizes [...]
Art’s Morality (A Reading of William H. Gass’s “The Artist and Society”)
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Animal Farm, Bruegel, Dia Beacon, Fiction and the Figures of Life, formalism, George Orwell, John Gardner, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, Minimalism, morality, Nineteen Eighty-Four, ostranenie, The Artist and Society, The Return of the Hunters, Viktor Shklovsky, William H. Gass on February 2, 2010 | 21 Comments »
Formalists are often accused of ignoring art’s morality, as well as its other social aspects. (Of course, artists are often faced with the same accusation—hence the logic by which legislators divert money toward math and the sciences. Whatever strange thing it is that the artist contributes to the culture, it is at best of secondary [...]
Tiny Shocks: Uncovering the Reductive Plot of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Breathless (1960), Breathless (1983), Chekhov, Cthulhu, Curtis White, Flaubert, G.I. Joe, Hamlet, Henry James, How Fiction Works, James Wood, Jean Luc Godard, Jean-François Lyotard, John Gardner, John Ruskin, Last Tango in Paris, Les Carabiniers, Madame Bovary, Nabokov, ostranenie (enstrangement), Saul Bellow, The 400 Blows, The Concept of Character in Fiction, The Middle Mind, Theodore Adorno, Theory of Prose, Three Blondes and Death, Tripticks, Viktor Shklovsky, Watchmen, William H. Gass, Yuriy Tarnawsky on January 31, 2010 | 40 Comments »
On January 22, I read Shya Scanlon’s post “The Dull King”; on January 25 I read his second post “Cover Your Tracks.” Both were about reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works. Before that I’d heard of James Wood but hadn’t read anything by him; I knew some people liked him and some didn’t like him. [...]
Uncover Your Tracks: A Preliminary Critique of James Wood’s How Fiction Works
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Aristotle, Ben Jonson, Don Quixote, Flarf, free indirect style, Gravity's Rainbow, Gustave Flaubert, How Fiction Works, James Cameron, James Wood, John Gardner, leitmotif, Madame Bovary, Night Moves, On Moral Fiction, rhetoric, Shakespeare, Shya Scanlon, The Red and the Black, Thomas Pynchon, Tristram Shandy, Wagner on January 27, 2010 | 41 Comments »
Shya posted something two days ago about James Wood’s How Fiction Works, in which Wood advocates the use of “free indirect style”: The entire book is built around a concept he calls “free indirect style,” which essentially refers to a prose style for which Gustave Flaubert is largely responsible. One of the hallmarks of this [...]
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Curtis White
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Announcing the Book Club Schedule!
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Big Other, C, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, Djuna Barnes, Gilgamesh, Gordon Lish, Helen Vendler, John Barth, John Gardner, John Hawkes, John Maier, Lyn Hejinian, Manuel Puig, Mary Caponegro, Mo Yan, My Life, Nightwood, Peru, Searches and Seizures: 3 Novellas, Stanley Elkin, The Complexities of Intimacy, The Sotweed Factor, Tom McCarthy, Travesty on December 26, 2010 | 9 Comments »
The votes are in, and the winner of the poll for the first book to be discussed in the Big Other Book Club is Tom McCarthy’s C. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize, hailed by many and knocked by maybe even more, McCarthy describes the book as dealing with technology and mourning. I’m excited to have, as [...]
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